Lost and found in the Middle East…

Tag Archives: Libya

The past doesn’t change, right? So once we know what happened, what else is there to do? What do historians do, anyway?

The history profession has many critics, but even many of its fans cannot figure out what historians do, other than teach. I recently visited family and encountered these questions more explicitly than I had in the past. As a historian starting an assistant professorship, these are questions I expect to hear from my students, and to which I hope to provide them with an adequate answer.

We might grant that the past doesn’t change, but to do so we need some large caveats. While what happened does not happen differently (unless time travel is in fact possible, according to Back to the Future), our access to what happened is indirect. New sources are being discovered which reveal additional aspects about parts of the past which were unfamiliar. Discovery of new data is one of the important functions of historians. And if you wish to learn anything outside of the past 500 years or outside of that portion of the world dominated by English speakers, you will need trained experts to interpret the evidence and translate it into a language you can understand.

But discovery of new data is only a small portion of what historians do, although it is always exciting when it happens. A larger portion of the historian’s job is to interpret the data which is already known. Okay, so we know that in 1258 the Mongol general Hulegu (grandson of Chinggis Khan) conquered Baghdad and executed the last Abbasid caliph. So what? Why is that an important event? Who cares? The historian’s job is to answer these questions. This conquest put a final whimpering end to the myth of unity in the Islamic world. For three centuries already the caliph in Baghdad had been a puppet in Baghdad with little real power, yet Sunni thugs who wanted to appear as legitimate rulers would send letters to Baghdad claiming to ask for recognition from the caliph, which the caliph rarely if ever refused. And thus, at least for the region west of Libya, there was a notion that all Islam was united under one caliph. After the Mongol pagan Hulegu killed the last Abbasid caliph, a new Abbasid caliphate was quickly established in Egypt (whose successors continued, after the Ottoman conquest of Egypt, in Istanbul until 1923), which achieved recognition within lands ruled from the Nile valley. But to the north in Anatolia and to the east of the Euphrates, areas now ruled by Mongols, Muslims religious thinkers learned how to get along without a caliph in their political theories. The events of 1258 forced some rapid rethinking of the relationship between religion and politics in the Islamic world.

That’s the significance question, but historians also care about the causality question: why did the events of 1258 happen as they did? Why did the Central Asian steppe nomads conquer most of Asia and part of Europe, but not India, Palestine, Egypt, or Western Europe? It’s easy to say that they ran out of gas, but why then? Why there? Western European sources from the 1240s to the 1260s show clear concern that the Mongol juggernaut would roll over them next. And why did the events of 1258 have the particular effects they did, rather than some other effects? Why didn’t all Muslims in Iraq rise up in revolt at the death of the caliph and attempt to establish a new caliphate, as some are doing today in northern Iraq? Causal questions are difficult, because the phenomena involved are many-faceted, and there are many variables that we don’t have access to in the evidence that survives (and historians are bound to the surviving evidence; that is what distinguishes them from authors of historical fiction). Because questions of causality are difficult, they occasion much debate, as questions of significance also do, and historians debate these questions.

One might naively suspect that the causality and significance questions could be settled once and for all, and then historians would move to more recent topics. But this has not happened, and will not happen, for a few reasons. One reason is that we interpret the evidence of the past through our present understanding of the world. As we understand better, or perhaps just differently, “how the world works,” so our understanding of the evidence for the past changes as well. Historians are necessary to help sift out narratives about the past which depend on theories about the world which have been disproven. For example, a theory about the rise of the Mongol Empire in the 13th C which remains popular today is the environmental theory put forward by René Grousset’s The Empire of the Steppes, according to which all Central Asian nomads grew up in a climate which forced them to be natural warriors with a desire to conquer the sedentary lands around them, and whenever the military of those sedentary lands degraded in quality, conquest from the steppe lands was inevitable. This is to say that the Mongol conquests did not depend at all upon what happened where the nomads lived, but was exclusively a function of what happened in the “civilized lands.” This is clearly wrong, and yet it remains popular, because it was written in a seductively clear narrative which was mass-marketed. Historians need to challenge this notion.

Another reason these arguments will never cease is that we investigate history to learn more about the present. As the present changes, so too does our view of the past; things that previously seemed very significant suddenly seem less so, or vice versa. When a descendent of Hulegu, Ghazan Khan, adopted Islam, this is seen as a significant event. (Personally, I doubt it was very significant). When Ghazan’s brother Oljeitu rejected Sunni Islam for Shi’ism, this is seen by some as a significant event, precisely those people who look at Middle East conflicts today and see them as sectarian conflicts between Sunni and Shia, while others think the switch was largely cosmetic on Oljeitu’s part (how much did he know about Islam anyway?). Cultural forces which previous generations assumed were universal motivators, such as religion, have been considered in some recent historical scholarship to be just a front for “the real motives,” usually economic or sociological. Historical causality and significance are difficult and elusive topics, and hence historians are always attempting to come to a better understanding of them.

But I think the most important job of the historian is not these, precisely, although these questions play a role in it. The most important job of the historian is to help society come to terms with the quantity of the past.

There is a lot more information about the past than any single person can hope to understand, no matter how thoroughly she or he devotes a lifetime to the pursuit (and some people need to earn a living, and see friends and family). The abundance of information about the past creates the problem that no one can fully understand it. It’s also true that no one can know all the things that are going on in the world right now, so scientists create models of the physical world to enable us to understand why things happen a certain way, and to allow us to interact with the world around us. Much more has happened than is happening (because whatever is happening is past just as quickly), and so historians create models and frameworks to organize our understanding of the past. These mental models and frameworks are necessary to make sense of the past, to reduce the overwhelming details into stories which tell us about our world and what makes it the way it is.

People create mental models to understand their world somewhat reflexively; it’s one of the amazing things about being human. But these models are not necessarily correct, no more than any other explanation after the fact is necessary correct. So just as amazing, to my mind, is the propensity for people to create erroneous models of the past. And historians argue about these models, to see which is better. To come back to Hulegu’s conquest of Baghdad in 1258, we know it had an effect. But was that effect significant enough to merit distinguishing all that went before it in the Middle East from all that went after it? Or did the year 1200 have more in common with 1300 in most of the Middle East than either did with 900? Historians debate this. (I have debated this.) This is the debate about periodization: where should we put the pauses in our accounts of the past in order to make the most sense? And while historians rightly think that too much effort has been put into “getting the periodization right,” since different phenomena will inevitably have different natural stopping points, periodization is just one aspect of the question of which mental model makes the most sense about the past.

Many people continue to believe history is just a series of names and dates, and no doubt this is how history is commonly taught. Meanwhile, historians see history as a series of debates, where the dispute is not (usually) about what happened or didn’t, but about larger questions, such as why it happened, why it matters, and what is the best framework for understanding this event in the larger trajectories of human experience. Such questions transform history from a deadening litany of the dead into a living and changing collective attempt to understand better the world in which we live today.

A military coup deposed and jailed an elected president, also jailing the leaders of his party and suspending the constitution. This is Egypt in 2013, but it could also be Turkey in 1960. Indeed, many observers familiar with varieties of Middle Eastern democracy see familiar signs of Turkey’s brand of military-guarded democracy in Egypt’s current events. CBC reports some similarities between the two countries, but the article refers only tersely to “covert coups and postmodern coups.” This phrase refers to the alleged 1993 covert military coup and the 1997 resignation of Turkish Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan in response to a military ultimatum.

Those observers who still wrestle with whether to label the Egyptian army’s intervention in politics last week a “coup” or not can replace every instance of the word “coup” with “ouster of the elected president under the alleged aegis of ‘popular sentiment’ represented by an uncounted number of protesters.” But I think when the commander-in-chief of the armed forces reads a decree which suspends the constitution, deposes the government, and has immediate force of governing law, followed by arrests of said leaders by soldiers, all the evidence points toward a military coup. Besides, “coup” is so much shorter than the alternative 19-word phrase.

But this Turkish model of Middle Eastern democracy, kept on a leash by the military to ensure its secularism, has probably been broken by current prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who had several hundred military personnel, including very senior generals, arrested and prosecuted for planning a coup. It may have been the success of that maneuver, and the fear of a military coup, which led Egyptian president Muhammad Mursi to order the former commander-in-chief of the Egyptian military, Husayn Tantawi, to retire. Nevertheless, Mursi was deposed by a military headed by his own appointee as defense minister, ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi, perhaps attracted to the prior Turkish model for the power it gave the military.

But a military-policed democracy is not the only model for elections in the Middle East (even leaving aside the single-party “democracies” such as Syria and supreme monarchies such as Saudi Arabia):

Iran polices its democracy by means of a “supreme leader” appointed for life, who also commands the loyalty of the Revolutionary Guards which exist to protect the “principles of the Islamic Revolution” of 1979, thus resulting in a military-clerical establishment which differs from the Turkish military-led democracy primarily in the beards of the men who call the shots.

Lebanon has a balkanized government which ensures that various religious groups have control of particular posts (the president is a Maronite Christian, the speaker for the parliament is Shi’ite, and the prime minister is Sunni, and parliamentary posts are allocated based on the population reported in the 1932 census).

In Israel voters choose parties rather than candidates, and the leaders of the parties parcel out the parliamentary seats between them based on their proportion of the popular vote; only then does the parliament elect the prime minister without consulting the populace. Of course, Palestinians do not have a vote in choosing the government which approves plans for new Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory and whose military operates checkpoints restricting their freedom of motion.

Jordan‘s king appoints members of the upper parliamentary “House of Senators,” while the lower “House of Deputies” is elected by the people, although opposition voices complain that the elections are rigged.

Each of these models is flawed in various ways, but it is not clear what other models of Middle Eastern democracy are available to Egypt. The post-2011 Libyan government has not yet written a constitution, and Sudan has its own military president following a 1989 coup. Iraq’s Sunni vice president Tariq al-Hashimi was convicted in absentia to execution, a sentence widely believed to be a political move by Iraq’s Shi’ite prime minister Nuri al-Maliki. Tunisia’s government has also not re-solidified following the 2011 revolution, and if Turkey has achieved a post-military democractic system, it remains to be seen how well it will fare. Although one frequently hears calls for “democracy,” the single word covers a wide range of governmental practices, and implementing a practical democracy is more challenging than calling for elections.

When the “Arab Spring” started to hit the Anglophone news with the protests in Tunisia and then Egypt early in 2011, Middle Eastern historians and Islamic Studies experts sat up and took notice. The resignation of Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak on 11 February 2011 drew in a wider readership, but for most Americans anyway it was the sharp spike in gasoline prices in March 2011 as the US intervened in Libya to impose a no-fly zone and aid the revolt against Mu’ammar Qaddafi that indicated something was happening in the Middle East. During the ensuing Libyan Civil War, which lasted until October 2011, Libyan headlines dominated the “Middle Eastern spot” in US world news media reporting.

But African nations were not the only venues for Arab Spring protests. Yemen was already a divided nation with President ‘Ali ‘Abdullah Salih in the capital of Sana’a contending on the one hand with the Shi’ite Houthi rebellion in the north of the country and on the other with a secessionist desire in the south to undo the 1990 unification of Yemen (in which the northern Yemen Arab Republic absorbed the southern People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen). When major protests began in Sana’a at the end of January, some reporters confidently predicted the swift end of Salih’s presidency. In fact, Salih held on thirteen months through a rising civil war until he secured a transfer of power to his vice-president at the end of February 2012, with himself remaining in Yemen and immune to prosecution. Things turned out rather better for Yemen’s Salih than for the former presidents of Tunisia or Egypt.

In the same month, almost the same day, protests in Syria started against the presidency of Bashar al-Assad. They went mostly unnoticed by Anglophone news media focusing on Egypt and then Libya. (Perhaps the nineteenth-century European colonial partition of Syria as French and Egypt as English continues in the interests of their respective news constituencies.) Hafez al-Assad, the predecessor and father of the current Syrian president, had demonstrated his willingness to violently crush any political opposition in his repeated destruction of the central Syrian city of Hama (in 1981 and most violently in 1982, when estimates of 10,000-40,000 people died). People who knew Syria knew that Bashar al-Assad would not resign easily, but it was after the early March, 2011 arrest of children in Dar’a in the south that protests rapidly grew, and then violence escalated as the army was sent to kill protesters. Some soldiers and officers defected, refusing to gun down peaceful protesters, and from July 2011 armed rebels have fought back against the remaining state army in the Syrian Civil War.

In Anglophone news media, there have been occasional whispers of continually worsening problems in Syria, but meanwhile US attention focused on Yemen (another former British protectorate), and then on Egyptian elections. Syria only occasionally made front-page headlines, and only consistently in April-June 2013 as there was public discussion whether chemical weapons had been used and whether that would cross President Barack Obama’s “red line” and trigger US involvement. Reporting on Syria was often more concerned with US/UK relations with Syria’s allies Russia and Iran, or Israel’s enemy Hezbollah. However, with the announcements in early June that the EU had withdrawn its arms embargo on Syria and the US would arm the rebels, coupled with the revelation the following week that the CIA had already been training the rebels, it seems that Anglophone public interest in the Syrian Civil War has waned.

For the casual peruser of Google news, it seems the “Middle East spot” in World news is again occupied by Egypt, which is experiencing enormous protests against President Muhammad Mursi, inaugurated one year ago, and the Muslim Brotherhood to which he belongs. Events in Egypt have certainly been dramatic, with up to millions turning out on the streets of Cairo and other cities, staging rival protests in support of or against the president, resignations of non-Muslim Brotherhood members of Mursi’s cabinet, and a 48-hour ultimatum by the army. Western news outlets have been caught between not particularly liking Islamists of Mursi’s stripe and not particularly liking military coups deposing democratically elected presidents.

(One cautionary note: several news reports, including this one from the BBC, indicated that the elections which brought Mursi to power were “considered free and fair.” The passive voice is concealing who considered the elections to be free and fair. It is true that the elections were not legally challenged, and did not immediately spark widespread street protests, and Mursi won with only a narrow margin rather than a suspicious landslide. It is also true that there were allegations of Muslim Brotherhood intimidation of voters suspected of opposing Mursi. I cannot now find the news articles, but at the time there were public threats by preachers against Coptic Christians if Mursi should not be elected, unreasonably blaming the Coptic minority for all opposition to the Islamist candidate, and subsequent low voter turnout in areas with concentrations of Coptic Christians. The elections were “considered free and fair” by Western governments not wishing to intervene.)

In some ways, Egypt’s news is bigger news than Syria’s. The news in Syria is: more people are dying. There continues to be violence. Just a new number of people killed today. And Egypt has an estimated population of 84.5 million to Syria’s 22.5 million. And more Western tourists go to Egypt than to Syria (or at least, they did until the Arab Spring brought the Middle Eastern tourism industry to a standstill). Egypt is what Anglophone readers want to hear about.

But when even a search of Google News for “Syria” only turns up hits on US Secretary of State John Kerry (not himself a Syrian, as it turns out) and US diplomacy with Russia (neither country part of Syria), it is clear that Syria is not interesting to readers of English-language news. (This search result has changed during the period of composing this post.) I fear the result will be that US and UK involvement in Syria will be limited to poorly considered and haphazardly implemented measures designed merely to keep Syria out of the political discourse in the US and the UK, to prevent the “Syrian situation” from becoming a tool against the current governments in those countries. It need hardly be said that such an evaluation of US and UK “national interests” will only make the Syrian Civil War more complicated and less tractable. For Western intervention in the Syrian Civil War to do more good than harm, it will take sustained interest in the situation on its own terms, an open willingness to engage with multiple conflicting Syrian perspectives on the conflict, and a refusal to let the siren song of optimistic quick-fixes and band-aids lure policy-makers away from careful analysis, much of it rather bleak.

In 1951, the British temporarily lost control of Iran’s oil fields, because they had refused to respond to Iranian complaints that the UK was not sharing the profits from the sale of oil with Iran. In response to Britain’s cold shoulder, the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalized the Iranian oil industry, to which Britain responded with a naval blockade and trade embargo. When economic sanctions failed to produce the desired de-nationalization of Iranian oil by 1953, the UK looked for more extreme possibilities. Due to UK support for the US during the Korean War, the US supported the UK in Iran by executing “Operation Ajax,” a covert operation to depose the popular Prime Minister and replace him with an Iranian military leader who would support greater power being held by the pro-Western Shah, Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi. As a result of the successful coup, the US secured a good share of Iranian oil and Iranian oil profits, and an ally against Soviet Russia to the north. The post-coup military rule crushed all political dissent and developed a much-hated secret police, SAVAK, trained by the CIA.

After 26 years of rule with Western support, the now widely-hated Shah was deposed in the Islamic Revolution of 1979, but the American role in 1953 was well-remembered. When the US admitted the exiled Shah into the country nine months after he left Iran, a group of Iranian students supporting the Islamic Revolution took over the American Embassy in Tehran and precipitated the Iran Hostage Crisis (known in Farsi as تسخیر لانه جاسوسی امریکا, “The capture of the American spy lair”). Thirty-four years after the Islamic Revolution, the government in Tehran remains firmly opposed to the US.

In retribution against Iran for the Islamic Revolution, the US supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, during which Iraqi forces invaded Iran, were driven out, and Iran pressed the offensive onto Iraqi soil. The US supported Iraq with intelligence regarding bombing targets and engaged the Iranian navy directly, including shooting down the civilian airliner Iran Air Flight 655, which the US claims was mistaken for a fighter jet. The US military also supplied arms to the Iraqi military during the war, arms which it would then face against itself during the two Gulf Wars. The government of Iraq is now pro-US, after two bloody US invasions of Iraq and a decade of even more deadly sectarian violence.

In the 2011 Arab Spring, protests broke out in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrayn, and Syria. Of the rulers challenged by these protests, President Zayn al-‘Abidin bin ‘Ali of Tunisia, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and President ‘Ali ‘Abdullah Salih of Yemen were US allies, despite their widely perceived autocratic and financially corrupt governments. By contrast, the US opposed President Mu’ammar Qaddafi of Libya and President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. The presidents of Tunisia and Egypt were deposed, and their elected replacements came from Islamist anti-US parties, while when ‘Ali ‘Abdullah Salih of Yemen finally stepped down, he was able to name a pro-US successor who was ratified by a popular referendum. The US ally Bahrayn crushed the protests with support from another US ally, Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, the US-aided ousting of Gaddafi in 2011 has opened the door to Libyan factional fighting and provided an excuse for Russian and Chinese intransigence regarding the government of Bashar al-Assad, with whom President Obama recently announced that he has lost patience and will “start” supplying arms to the Syrian rebels. The revelation this week that the CIA has already been supplying arms to and training the rebels since 2012 is hardly a surprise, as it is in keeping with the picture of covert CIA activities supporting American interests abroad.

I am not arguing that Bashar al-Assad is fine or Gaddafi was fine, or that the current president of Egypt, Muhammad Morsi, represents the “will of the Egyptian people” (there were election problems, including Morsi supporters violently intimidating people suspected of opposing Morsi, including Christians and liberals, in order to prevent them from voting at all). I am arguing that US foreign policy and CIA operations have pursued a narrow and short-term definition of “American interests” which have destabilized and impoverished Middle Eastern countries involved and stoked anti-American sentiments there, ultimately to the detriment of longer-term American interests abroad. An Eastern European recently said to me over dinner, “I would not mind living in America, but I would not want to be a target of American foreign policy.”

In light of this perennial neglect of long-term interests, the US government needs to re-think its approach to the Middle East region as a whole. The short-term “solutions” employed by the US to respond to current crises have only succeeded in creating another round of crises. To take a particular current example, will US involvement in the Syrian Civil War against Bashar al-Assad actually create “a better Syria,” or will it simply supply arms to the next round of Middle Eastern forces that the US will then seek to dismantle five, ten, or thirty years down the road? The only way to avoid perpetuating the cycle of crises generated by previous crises is to view Middle Easterners as people with their own interests, rather than solely as possible calculi in American interests abroad. Unless Middle Easterners can be understood on their own terms, as people in their own right, the US will continue to “guess wrong” in its strategic initiatives in the region. These faux pas, to put it mildly, result in continual loss of life both to Americans and especially to Middle Easterners, and must be stopped.

First let me say that I know there is bigger news about Syria today, such as US Senator John McCain‘s surprise visit to the Free Syrian Army and the European Union’s decision to end the arms embargo against Syria. I am not yet commenting on those, as I wait to learn more about what each development will mean. I also have yet to post regarding the effectiveness of drone attacks, as I still intend to do.

But what caught my eye earlier today was a small article from the Chinese government news agency Xinhua, which reported that Hasan ‘Abd al-‘Azim, the leader of the Syrian secularist opposition group the National Coordinating Body, promised to participate “positively” in the US-Russia backed “Geneva 2” negotiations to seek a political end to the bloodshed in Syria, widely expected to occur some time in June.

Well, yes, I mean, well, sort of. The Syrian National Council brings together secularists like George Sabra and non-jihadi but distinctly non-secularist politicians such as past president Burhan Ghalioun, who was criticized for being “too close to the Muslim Brotherhood.” The National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change (هيئة التنسيق الوطنية لقوى التغيير الديمقراطي, often known as the “National Coordination Committee” or NCC), on the other hand, is a coalition of secularist opposition parties which is not recognized by the Syrian National Coalition, many of whose members suspect that they are a front for regime sympathizers or double agents working for the Assad regime. It is true that the Assad government is secularist as well, and the NCC did not formally call for Assad’s removal until September 2012. On the other hand, the NCC is now calling for Assad’s removal, which puts them more squarely with the rest of the opposition, despite the suspicions of other opposition groups. They have rarely been noticed by Western media outlets, which have tended to focus on the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian National Coalition, perhaps viewing them by analogy with Libya’s National Transition Council.

Why is China picking up on the NCC? While the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian National Coalition are calling for foreign military aid, the NCC rejects external military intervention. This accords very well with China’s (and Russia’s) repudiation of “foreign meddling” in Syria, seen in their repeated UN Security Council veto of any UN military action in Syria, and this mutual interest in “non-interference” explains why the NCC has received diplomatic support from both China and Russia. If China and Russia cannot have the Assad regime, the NCC is their opposition of choice.

The NCC also used to have a number of Kurdish member parties, but those parties have withdrawn to form the Kurdish National Council, which is separatist as well as secularist and leftist. The KNC is arguing that the part of Syria where Kurds form the majority (in the northeast of the country) should be given full Kurdish autonomy, while the SNC and NCC both are pushing for maintaining Syria’s current borders.

With so many opposition groups to choose from, the Geneva 2 meeting may end up with every foreign country having its preferred Syrian opposition coalition.

On Friday, Time published some remarks by Andrei Klimov, a leading Russian legislator (and not to be confused with the undefeated lightweight boxer of that name), which indicated why Russia is going ahead with supplying anti-aircraft and anti-naval (“ship-killer”) missiles to the Assad regime, despite requests from the US and Israel to halt the shipments. In sum, Klimov presented the move as an attempt to ensure that outside force is not used to end the Assad regime in Syria without a political solution freely chosen by Assad and his allies (Russia and Iran most notably among them). Klimov signaled distrust of the US particularly and regret over the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya which turned a “no-fly zone” into direct attacks on Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi‘s forces.

President Obama’s recent decision to rule out unilateral US involvement in Syria probably speaks to Moscow’s concerns. But commentators have criticized Obama for this move, and have criticized Secretary of State Kerry and others for their failure to budge Moscow’s policy of arming the Assad regime (as if it were in their power to do so).

One additional aspect of the ongoing civil war in Syria which may worry Moscow, which was not mentioned by Klimov, could either prompt additional military support for the regime or hesitancy about pouring more weapons into Syria. That is the Chechen element in the jihadi Syrian rebel groups. The commander of the Muhajireen Brigade is Abu Omar al-Shishani, a Chechen Islamist who has previously fought against Russia in his native Chechnya, and other Islamist groups are employing Chechen fighters. It was even rumored that the two abducted metropolitan archbishops of Aleppo were abducted by Chechens. A month ago Mark Galeotti documented other instances of Chechen involvement in Syria, and the potential Russian government concern over the subject, in a post which deserves to be more widely known.

The effects of the Chechen concern may turn on how confident Russia is that the Assad regime can ensure that the Russian weapons do not fall into the hands of rebels. Rebel forces have captured weapons and ammunition, even tanks, from the regime in the past, and used them against Assad’s own forces. Especially with Israel openly threatening Assad with additional air strikes, the possibility of Assad’s forces spreading themselves thinner in order to respond to further Israeli attacks raises the possibility for further rebel gains against the regime forces, and thus for capturing Russian missiles.

While any captured anti-aircraft weapons would mostly likely stay in Syria to be used against the regime (and the Russian navy need not fear any “ship-killer” missiles launched from mountainous Chechnya), after the end of the war (whether jihadis take over Syria or are forced to withdraw) any captured weapons might make their way out to be used in Chechnya against Russian government forces there. Just as the US has been wary of supplying weapons to the Free Syrian Army which might make their way into al-Qa’ida‘s hands, thence to be used by al-Qa’ida in attacks against the US, so the Russian-supplied arms to Assad might be captured in battle by jihadi militants with Chechen connections.

Russia might respond to this possibility in various ways. It might decide to intervene more directly in Syria to prop up the Assad regime against the Chechen jihadi rebels, for example. Or it may decide that future weapons shipments to the Syrian regime should not contain more powerful weapons that, if removed to a Chechnyan context, could threaten its own forces. Mark Galeotti suggested that the existence of Chechen jihadi fighters moving from one hotspot to another may mean that Russia will consider the prolongation of the conflict in its own domestic best interest. But the Chechen connection certainly complicates both Russian involvement in the Syrian Civil War and Western attempts to sway Russian support away from the Assad regime.